Proof I was Here

When we take a photograph, we're usually trying to preserve what's in front of the camera.

A landscape. An animal. A person. A moment we know won't look exactly the same again.

But I've started to think photographs preserve something else, too.

Us.

There are photographs I've taken that probably don't mean much to anyone else. Someone might see a mountain, a stretch of road, a bird sitting on a branch, or sunlight coming through the trees. But when I look at them, I remember everything that existed outside the frame.

I remember how cold it was. The drive there. The weather. The anticipation of seeing what might be around the next corner. Sometimes I remember exactly what was happening in my life when I took it.

None of those things are visible in the photograph.

But somehow, they're still there.

That's one of the strange things about photography. We spend so much time behind the camera trying to disappear from the image. We wait for people to walk out of the frame. We move our shadows. We find the angle that leaves no trace of the person standing there with a camera.

And yet, I think we're in every photograph we take.

We're there in what caught our attention.

In where we chose to stand.

In what we included and what we left outside the frame.

In the moment that made us stop when we could have kept walking.

A photograph doesn't only say, this existed.

It says, I noticed it.

Maybe that's part of why I take so many photographs. Not because I'm afraid I'll forget what something looked like, but because photographs become little markers along the way. Breadcrumbs left behind by different versions of myself.

I went here.

I saw this.

This mattered to me.

I was here.

Years from now, I know some of the details will disappear. Roads will blur together. I'll forget what month something happened or exactly how I found a particular place. The world in some of those photographs will change, too. Trees will grow. Buildings will disappear. Seasons will come and go thousands of times.

And I'll change with it.

But the photograph will still hold that fraction of a second when everything happened to exist exactly as it did.

Including me, just outside the frame.

Maybe that's what a photograph really is. Not only proof that something beautiful existed, but proof that I was there to see it.

-Blaine Ford